indow--a room wherein,
tradition says, one of the fair daughters of Hurstmonceux was starved
to death in her twenty-first year. On the west were the domestic
apartments, among them the great kitchen and bakehouse, with an oven in
which, it was declared, a coach and horses might easily turn. On the
upper floor, lighted by the open space of the Green Court, were the
Bethlehem chambers, otherwise the guest-rooms, and the Green Gallery, a
room filled with pictures and hung with green cloth. One old writer
speaks of these upper rooms as "sufficient to lodge a garrison"; and
adequate provision would seem to have been necessary, for in its heyday
Hurstmonceux had many and illustrious visitors. Everything seems to
have been done on such a lavish scale that we are fully prepared for
such interesting details as the record that at the marriage of Grace
Naylor "butts of beer were left standing at the park gates for the
refreshment of chance passers-by"; also that twenty old female
retainers were kept constantly employed at the weeding and tidying of
the Green and other courtyards.

For long it was a mere skeleton, at the mercy of nature and man. As
late as 1752 Horace Walpole could write of it in a letter to his friend
Richard Bentley: "It was built in the reign of Henry VI, and is as
perfect as the first day. It does not seem to have ever been quite
finished, or at least that age was not arrived at the luxury of
whitewash, for almost all the walls are in their native brick-hood."
And yet, despite Mr. Walpole's assertions as to its continued
perfectness, so soon after this as 1777 the castle was dismantled. The
truth is: if the castle has escaped the general fate of this region and
avoided the scourge of the invader, it has nevertheless suffered much
at the hands of its friends. In the year mentioned the owner was a
Mrs. Henrietta Hare, ancestor of the author of _Memorials of a Quiet
Life_, a volume which deals very faithfully with this ancient fabric.
This lady, desiring to use the materials for the construction of a new
mansion on a higher site, called in the arch-vandal Wyatt, and he (to
quote Augustus Hare's _Memorials_) "declared that the castle was in a
hopeless state of dilapidation, though another authority had just
affirmed that in all material points its condition was as good as on
the day on which it was built.... The castle was unroofed.... A great
sale was held in the park, whither the London brokers came in